Sept. 17, Tuesday – Matt Mullenweg posts a blog post entitled “WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking” obviously about the WordPress ecosystem.
https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/
This article is what Matt Mullenweg decided to read on Sept. 20th, at WordCamp US.
Sept. 20, Friday, 3:45pm – Matt Mullenweg takes the stage at WordCamp US and he immediately has technical issues. Matt wanted to read his letter post on Sept. 17th with synchronized jazz music but they couldn’t get the audio to work. At first, I thought there was going to be a standard “State of the Word” address, but I realized that it was that, but a WP Engine roast. Feel free to watch the beginning of #WPdrama:
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
Sept. 20, Friday, 5:38pm: Q&A started. So after Matt talks about how horrible WP Engine and Silver Lake are, they open it up for questions. Some of the questions were good, but to be honest, I think we were all in shock. I know that I was beyond confused on what had just happened. It took me a couple of days to grasp the damage that had just taken place.
Sept. 20, Friday, 5:20pm – This picture was taken by me at the conference’s main hotel. This is a 5 minute walk from the conference. It seemed to be a huddle of WP Engine employees. I have no idea what they said, but I’m sure if I were a WP Engine employee, and Matt just dumped all over my company, I’d be scared.
Sept. 21 – Matt Mullenweg posts an article entitled “On WP Engine” and it links to this article on WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/.
All I can really understand from this post is that WP Engine is not WordPress because by default WP Engine turns off revisions. That is not really a reason to say it isn’t WordPress. There are a lot of options that can be turned on or off in wp_config.php, and it doesn’t stop being WordPress because one of the features are turned off. It’s quite a childish argument.
Sept. 25 – Matt Mullenweg posts an article entitled “Charitable Contributions” (https://ma.tt/2024/09/charitable-contributions/).
I’m not exactly sure why Matt needed to post how much money he has donated from 2011 to 2023. At the end of the post, he challenges Lee Wittlinger (Silver Lake’s CEO) and Heather Brunner (WP Engine’s CEO) to also post how much they have donated. The only way I can see this is some kind of childish fight. That’s it.
Sept. 25 – WP Engine was blocked from accessing wordpress.org for plugin, themes and core updates. Matt’s article about it was posted on wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned
Sept. 26 – Matt Mullenweg posts an article entitled “WPE & Trademarks” (https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/).
This is where Matt shifts from them not giving back enough to how “WP Engine is violating the WordPress’ trademarks.” In the original WordCamp talk, Matt very lightly touched on trademarks, but the primary problem before THIS POST is that they weren’t giving back “man hours” to WordPress. After this post, it is focused on trademarks.
I would assume that this shift is just the only way they can actually get them legally. Automattic can’t demand that they give back (even though that is exactly what Matt was demanding) so they will get them on trademark infringement.
Sept. 26 – Matt Mellenweg is on “ThePrimeTime” for 27 minutes.
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
This is during the “cut off” from wordpress.org for WP Engine.
Sept. 28 – WP Engine has been lifted, giving WP Engine 3 days to copy wordpress.org’s infrastructure.
Link: https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-announces-temporary-lifting-of-wp-engine-ban
Sept. 29 – Matt Mullenweg is on “Theo – t3.gg” for 2 hours
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
This is two hours long and it is worth watching at least some highlights. I think Theo asks some really good questions and gives us some clarity of what is going on.
Oct. 2 – WP Engine posts on Twitter: https://x.com/wpengine/status/1841643374090031461 and they link to the complaint: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al.pdf
Oct. 3 – Theo is Cited in the WordPress lawsuit and he posts a YouTube video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edCrrWj6WK4
Oct. 8 – David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) posts an article entitled “Automattic is doing open source dirty.”
DHH’s link: https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-dirty-b95cf128
If you don’t know how DHH is, it is worth doing some research.. From my perspective, he is a genius and I hold him in pretty high regard concerning his projects “Ruby on Rails” and his company 37signal. He’s beyond successful and if it were not for him, we probably wouldn’t have a lot of MVC frameworks that exist today.
Oct. 12 – ACF Is taken over by Matt/Automattic and it is renamed to Secure Custom Fields.
Link: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-longer-available-on-wordpress-org/
Can you imagine investing years worth of work in the name of open source and having it taken over by Matt?
Oct. 14 – Matt Mellenweg wrote a blog post entitled “Response to DHH.”
This article was taken down, but here is the original post: https://archive.is/4yLNR
Matt starts off saying “I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this a respectful debate” and then rips into DHH personally and financially and says “David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist.”
It was at this point where I had to pick sides. I do see that Matt has a couple of valid points, but the rampage of Matt became too much to be on his side.
Oct. 14 – Matt takes the DHH post down and it is replaced by a nicer response to DHH.
Link: https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/
I think it was at this point where Matt had to have gotten someone to convince Matt that the scorched earth approach isn’t the way to do it. I think if you’re going against strong leaders in the open source world, you better have a legit concern or you’re going to wind up just looking mad.
Please, if you want to add to this log, please reach out to me. I’d love to add insites.